Clean hands, dirty name: Do we really need a diaper-wipe glove?

If you were to stack up all the diapers I have changed over the course of three kids … well, it would be a Superfund site. Nobody could go near it. Nuke it from orbit would be the best bet.

Let’s just say my hands have changed a mountain of diapers. And not once over nine years did it ever occur to me, “what I really need to do is to wipe this bum with a glove!”

That’s why I’m a struggling journalist working the website by night and cleaning up after my kids by day. I’m no genius, like the guy who thought up “S***tens.”

Yes, a guy by the name of Richie Wilson invented a diaper-wipe glove, then explicitly named it after a combination of “mittens” and a crappy word that President Trump can say on this website, but I cannot.

This photo, courtesy of the S***tens Facebook page, shows the product that we are totally not making up. Not only are they FDA-approved, but you can follow them on Twitter: http://bit.ly/2FVkMKm

Yes. These actually exist. I am not S***ten you. Let’s take a paragraph from the company’s website to fully explain what’s going on (edited, of course, for the squeamish).

“S***tens are disposable, mitten-shaped moist wipes. While old fashioned, square wet wipes put your hands at risk for all kinds of accidental fecal contamination, the genius mitten shape of a S***ten provides not only safety from poop, but on a larger scale, emotional peace of mind.”

(The FAQ section of their website is rather entertaining. Clearly, if you call your product S***tens, you can’t take yourself too seriously.)

As a dad who has possibly changed more diapers than mom (I was suspiciously unlucky at rock-paper-scissors), I can tell you that there were times when these may have been handy, so to speak, and times when they wouldn’t have helped.

One of my three children — the one who would prove to be more anxious — would, as a wee toddler, hold on to his bowels with an alien tenaciousness until he was transformed into a tiny human “poop bomb.” One afternoon (at home, Jesus, I am still thankful), the bomb went off with enough force to send the effluent skyward. Not only did we “lose containment” (our technical term), but the poop surge went up nearly to his armpits.

I carried him (at arm’s length) to the back porch where I had to CUT OFF his shirt like an EMT, then I literally hosed him down. I’d tell you nothing grows still in that part of the backyard, but actually nothing grows at all in any part of the backyard. It’s probably not a coincidence. A box of 20 S***tens would’ve been an umbrella in an avalanche.

And yes, it’s just 20 S***tens per $20 box (recently back in stock on Amazon). That’s $1 each. Or, if you have a spirited infant, an Abraham Lincoln gone over the course of an hour. For the same $20, you can buy a box of hundreds and hundreds of regular wipes and still have money enough for a six-pack of beer. It hardly seems worth it, except as a gag gift.

On the other hand — probably the clean one — you might be willing to pay for a premium for paws unsullied by lingering odors you can’t quite scrub away.

Not me. I worked my way through that mountain of diapers the old-fashioned way: one damp and flimsy overmatched wipe at a time.